Blockbuster, once the dominant source of rental videos for America’s movie lovers, filed for Ch. 11 bankruptcy protection yesterday. This event has been forecast for a long time, as first Netflix, the super-handy get your videos via mail service, and then Redbox, whose video rental kiosks are becoming ubiquitous across the land, blew the Blockbuster business model out of the water. Everything Blockbuster did in response, including offering their own mail subscription service to counter Netflix and opening their own kiosks, was way too little way too late.

I remember the day, roughly seven years ago, when our first Netflix movie arrived in our mailbox. Right then I knew I would never darken the doors of Blockbuster or any of their ilk again. The big question is why didn’t Blockbuster see it coming? Why weren’t they the first ones out of the gate with a video subscription service? Apparently the word “proactive” was just not part of their corporate lingo. Everything they did was reactive and way too slow.

Once Netflix launched it service in 1999, it took Blockbuster five years to counter with their own subscription service. It also took them four years after the launch of the Redbox kiosks to start opening up their own kiosks. If they had used their branding power to quickly counter these moves, they may have taken away the first-mover advantage that both Netflix and Redbox had. Instead, they moved at a snail’s pace in both cases.

Of course, the Blockbuster tale is far more complicated than just failing to innovate, as this Newsweek article, “The Rise and Fall of Blockbuster,” points out. Bad accounting, a killer debt load, failed mergers and plenty of failed leadership all added to the company’s problems. But any organization that takes five years to respond to a new business model in its industry that for all intents and purposes makes its own business model obsolete is bound to fail, even without the mountain of debt that Blockbuster had sitting on its shoulders.

Of course, when you are the industry leader, it is hard to wake up one day and say, “Hey, we need to cannibalize our business model because Netflix is gonna eat our lunch.” It takes a special kind of leadership to take that road and, clearly, Blockbuster didn’t have it.

Now it has $1 billion in assets and $1.46 billion in debt. Good luck making that equation work. Movie Gallery, Inc., the one-time runner-up to Blockbuster in the U.S. movie rental chain game, filed for bankruptcy twice before finally being liquidated in August. As someone who hasn’t set foot in a video store since approximately 2003, I wouldn’t be the least surprised to see Blockbuster follow that same path. When your business model becomes a dinosaur, can oblivion be far behind?